Writing & Healing by Pamela Post-Ferrante

This book is for cancer survivors: those in treatment and those who have completed treatment and are wondering what to do next. Both would benefit from a support group that is grounded in healing themes, mindful meditations, and community.

Writing and Healing: A Mindful Guide for Cancer Survivors (with accompanying CD) serves as a guide for support groups in using expressive writing as a therapeutic experience. The sessions in the book help to release stress and encourage positive feelings, offering a way to support treatment and move forward after treatment. The book is also full of stories, drawings, and vignettes, inspiring survivors to explore their own healing path.

Within the book is a step-by-step guide enabling others (such as nurses, social workers, psychologists, or ministers) to lead these groups. This includes ways to gather the creative materials and instructions on how to lead the opening, closing and exercises of the twelve sessions. Alternatively, cancer survivors may prefer to gather on their own and take turns leading the group. For those who want to use the book on their own, Writing and Healing also includes a CD of the meditations and suggestions for how to follow the exercises on one’s own.

The twelve sessions in this book are full of cleansing and hope, and the sort of writing, sharing, and listening which occurs is a strengthening act.

Pamela Post-Ferrante, MEd, MFA, CAGS, is a writer, teacher and workshop leader. She teaches in the Graduate School of Expressive Therapies at Lesley University and currently leads sessions privately and in Boston area hospitals for cancer survivors. She was published in Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer. Her work has been heard on National Public Radio.Gabriele Rico, PhD., lecturer, workshop leader, author and professor of English and Creative Arts at San Jose State University, has led the way in the application of brain research to the creative process and writing. Her doctoral thesis from Stanford in 1976 on creativity and split-brain theory produced "clustering," a way to generate new and creative ideas and stories. Her publications include Writing the Natural Way, Pain and Possibility, and The Power of Story.